Date of Award

11-2014

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Chair

Sathya N. Gangadharan, Ph.D.

First Committee Member

Sandra K. Boetcher, Ph.D.

Second Committee Member

Ilteris Demirkiran, Ph.D.

Abstract

In this thesis, the first part is conducting an investigation of the hydrodynamic characteristics (pressure and velocity) of fluid flow (water) through an impeller of a centrifugal pump. To illustrate a one-dimensional model is used to identify an impeller of a GDM 10 x 12 HD centrifugal pump using Vista CPD design and BladeGen tool. A three-dimensional model is then built with a commercial software package ANSYS Blade Modeler. The structured mesh of the impeller blade is obtained by using TurboGrid system. The volute of the centrifugal pump is built in ANSYS geometry, and an unstructured mesh is accomplished by using a very fine mesh. Afterwards, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is applied in ANSYS-CFX to set output parameters of objectives and constraints of the centrifugal pump GDM 10 x 12 HD impeller and volute to get optimum values of efficiency, total head and performance. In addition, the objective of this research is to maximize the efficiency and the total head for the centrifugal pump GDM 10 x 12 HD, making sure that the performance target does not exceed the value of the relative ratio of outlet and inlet pressure so that the head losses do not increase. The CAD modeler of the impeller, with inlet and outlet angles, are modeled using BladeGen modeler. The efficiency and the head of the standard centrifugal pump is observed to be 61% and 42.6 m respectively.

Finally, HEEDS MDO-Modeler is used to perform the multi-objective optimization process to obtain the optimal results of the pump efficiency and the head. After optimization the efficiency of the centrifugal pump is increased by 3.2% and the optimized head is decreased by 2% as compared to baseline values. In addition, the blade thickness and the volute are decreased by 13.5% and 10.2% respectively from the original values.

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